In this blog, we will go over some of our best tips to help you deliver a better employees experience at your company.

Employee Experience Defined

Workplace trends are continuously changing, and those changes can be hard to keep up with. Therefore, today’s employers are being tasked with the job of attracting and retaining talent within their organizations.

This job becomes even more challenging now that many of our employees are remote and most of them are mobile-oriented.

To keep up with the new trends, innovative companies are taking steps towards a new vision of the traditional role of HR, leadership and internal comms.

Meaning, they are redirecting their focus on employee experience which aims to provide employees with positive touchpoints throughout their employment lifecycle. The goal to generate greater levels of enthusiasm, involvement, and employer brand commitment.

"The employee experience is the journey an employee takes with your organization. It includes all the interactions an employee has with your organization before, during and after their tenure."

When it comes to employee experience, the goal to improve "employee engagement, performance and development which are key themes throughout most of the employee life cycle. Getting them right is essential to getting employee experience right.”

To simplify it, all of the individual moments of an employee’s experience play a role in how a worker feels about an employer’s purpose, brand and culture. These feelings directly affect employee engagement, retention, performance and development.

13 Tips to Improve Employee Experience

A recent study by Deloitte University Press shows that almost 80% of executives worldwide rate employee experience as important or very important.

3. Support Your Employees’ Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance is one of the most important factors for improving employee experience.

Yet, only 1 in every 3 employees feel like they have a good work-life balance, and lack of flexibility in the workplace is the main reason for that.

Another survey on work-life balance showed that on average, only 74% of work is done during normal working hours. In other words, we take more than a quarter of our work home with us.

4. Maintain Good Manager-Employee Relationships

Managers alone have the biggest responsibility when it comes to team engagement.

The manager-employee relationship is the most important relationship at every stage of the employee’s journey, and it has a significant impact on employee experience. Managers affect employees’ work experience in how they empower them, help them develop their strengths, and engage with them.

Relationships are even harder to build with remote and deskless employees. According to Service Now, 74% of employees agree with the statement “I have a positive relationship with my direct manager”, compared to 67% of deskless workers.

5. Create a Culture of Teamwork and Collaboration

A recent study by Deloitte completed with Facebook found that only 14% of companies believe their internal processes for collaboration and decision making are working well.

As a culture of collaboration, transparent communication and teamwork drive positive employee experience, many employers are now investing more into creating such culture.

Employee communication solutions like Smarp enable IC departments, leaders and employees to continuously engage in two-way company conversations and dialogues that result in higher experience and engagement.

6. Take Advantage of the New Communication Technology

According to research, 77% of companies believe email is no longer a viable tool for effective communication.

Moreover, information overload is one of the main reasons that cause poor employee experience and work-life balance.

Often, we don’t even think about how much time our employees spend communicating internally and externally, and those numbers are significant.

Did you know that 40% of knowledge workers never get more than 30 minutes straight of focused time? Emails as the primary mean of communication is the reason why it happens.

Therefore, employers now need to reconsider how they communicate with their employees. New internal communication solutions like Smarp are designed to make this process much more effective, less time consuming and more engaging to employees.

7. Improve Your Onboarding Process

The experience you deliver during the onboarding process will influence how your employees feel and perform later on. Yet, only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job in onboarding them.

Employers should help employees quickly socialize into their team, align with the organization’s purpose and learn how the organization functions.

Moreover, large organizations struggle even more when it comes to improving employee onboarding experience with proper communication.

Therefore, effective employee communication should be at the core of creating a memorable employee experience.

This is, however, possible to achieve only with employee communication solutions that mimic the way employees communicate in their private lives.

8. Provide Easy Access to Information Employees Need

It is surprising to see that nearly half of employeesstill struggle to get information and answers to their questions at work.

The primary focus for every employee in the workplace should be doing great work for their organization, not figuring out how to navigate daily administrative tasks and find relevant information.

Not convinced? Check out these stats from the same research:

Even with all the technology and tools used in the workplace today, employees are still not satisfied with the experience of getting the help and information they need.

Moreover, this abundance of various communication, project management and document sharing tools can cause confusion resulting in the loss of employee productivity.

Luckily, there are tools that can connect all your workplace communication channels into a central place where employees can find important information and join daily conversations at work.

9. Make Your Employees Feel Heard

Employees want to be heard and they want to feel like their voice matters.

Yet, according to research, only a quarter of employees feel like they can freely express themselves at work. One quarter report that they often choose not to speak up at work, even when they have something they would like to say.

Encouraging employee's voice is one of the most effective ways to boost employee experience.

10. Give Continuous Feedback and Show Recognition

Just 2 in 10 employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work. Many companies are now realizing that delivering annual performance reviews is not enough to improve employee experience, motivation and performance.

According to research by Deloitte, 22% of companies survey employees quarterly or more often, 79% survey employees annually or less, and 14% never survey employees at all.

Yet, employees respond best to regular, informal feedback on their work and frequent praise and recognition for excellent work.

Therefore, organizations now must consider implementing more informal and continuous employee feedback as well as employee recognition and rewards programs.

11. Enable Career Development and Growth

One of the main, often the biggest, reasons why people change jobs today is career growth opportunities. Standard changes to job titles and pay raises are often not frequent enough to satisfy employees' desire to grow and develop.

To improve employee experience, it is important for employees to see a path forward in their organization: opportunities to gain new skills, work with new people or enjoy greater autonomy.

12. Give Special Attention to Your Deskless and Non-Wired Employees

Non-wired and remote employees need more effort on the employer’s side to feel like they belong to the company.

Often, poor communication is the main reason why these employees feel lonely or left out. Therefore, employers now need to think of ways to better engage and communicate with their remote, deskless and front-line employees.

One of the most efficient solutions is switching to a mobile-first internal communication.

13. Switch to the Mobile-First Mindset

In order to improve employee experience, we need to put ourselves in employees' shoes. We need to think of their preferences and their way of life.

Since the majority of today’s workforce is made of Gen Z and Millenials, we need to understand that mobile is their primary and preferred way of communication.

Yet, according to ServiceNow research, only 52% of employees have been allowed to use a smartphone or tablet to access employee tools from HR or other departments.

On the other side, employees who have had experience using a mobile device to access tools from HR or other departments said that these solutions improved their ability to access information, resolve issues, and get work done.

Hopefully, these stats have convinced you about the importance of implementing a mobile-first employee communication solution at your organization.

The Evolution of Employee Experience

In the past, we had mostly been talking about how to improve employee motivation, engagement, satisfaction and productivity.

Satisfying our employees is harder today than ever before. The emergence of new jobs, skills and technologies require from employers to adjust to the new trends and care about their employees’ experience both at work and in their private lives.

The war for talent is extremely intense today. Therefore, attracting and retaining talent is the main goal for companies across the world. This can only be achieved by providing an extraordinary employee experience.

The Role of Communication in Shaping a Great Employee Experience

Throughout their whole journey and life-cycle, employees have the need to be informed and up-to-date with what is happening within the organization. Informed employees do their jobs better, and they are also happier with their employers and they have a much better work-life balance.

Communicators such as internal communications departments, human resources, managers, leaders and other professionals need to do a better job communicating in a faster, more personalized and more engaging way across the organization.

However, this can be extremely hard to achieve, especially in large organizations, without the right communication tools.

Deliver a Better Employee Experience with Smarp

With proper employee communication tools, you are much more likely to shape a positive employee experience at your company.

Therefore, organizations now must consider implementing new communication technologies that enable leaders and internal comms departments to improve employee experience through their employee lifecycle.

With employee communications solutions such as Smarp, organizations can:

Easily reach all employees with relevant information and updates

Reach all employees regardless of their location

Create and share personalized content that drives employee engagement

Make all the content easily shareable within and outside the organization

Support two-way conversations with employees

Achieve a complete organizational and strategic alignment

Help employees keepimportant documents, messages and conversations in one place

Enable employees to have instant access to information on their mobile phones

Better filter and prioritize content delivery to prevent information overload in the workplace.